Self Reflection
I felt that going through the entire process of each step in this project, from the Heuristic Evaluation to reflecting on the usability tests, was immensely beneficial to me. Having the opportunity to analyze the website first made me think of the things that I thought were issues, and then watch to see if others had the same problems when it came to the usability tests. Also, looking at the users and what they were looking for on the website in the Two Personas and Test Plan sections gave a different perspective on looking at websites. It really emphasized how users are going to have very specific goals when confronted with a website, so that website needs to cater to what they are going to look for in order to be successful. The most influential part of this project was actually carrying out the usability tests. Watching users try to accomplish the tasks I had created put searching through a website in a new perspective to me. In many of the tasks, all three of the users would carry them out in a completely different way from each other, or from how I would have gone about it. They also would each have their own point where they thought they had completed the task, so they interpreted it differently than each of the other users, or from how I had intended for it to be interpreted. Overall, I thought this was a very useful experience, and it provided a great amount of information that I can take forward with me on my path to building and analyzing more websites in the future.